S5: E15: Chris Kerr: The Godfather of Vegan Venture Capital
“We spent 50 years fighting industry and I mean, fighting industry. And we were poking a bear and poking a bear and poking a bear. And then one day that bear came up and just nuzzled us under the neck and said, “okay, we're interested.” …It was industry, it was the big players that came in and said, “why are we fighting this? If consumers are asking for plant-based, we can sell plant-based.’”
– Chris Kerr
Chris Kerr is on a mission to upend the entire food industry.
Chris is the Chief Investment Officer at Unovis/New Crop Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in entrepreneurs whose products or services replace foods derived from animal agriculture. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Gathered Foods, known for its Good Catch plant-based seafood products, the co-founder and Director of Wicked Foods, and the director of Cultivated Food Labs.
Chris is one of the first people that helped direct early-stage investments for plant-based food companies. He’s been focused on impact investing with a concentration on the plant-based food sector since 2007 when he worked with the Humane Society of the United States to manage their investments into the plant-based food industry and played a key role in helping Daiya cheese secure distribution in Whole Foods Market.
“You can't rescue your way out of the animal protection world, you just can’t. So, what can we do to actually change it at its base? If we can change people's opinion about eating plants, eating something other than animals, then maybe we wouldn't have to keep hitting them over the head with the ethical and moral baseball bat.” – Chris Kerr
Chris is helping some of the top plant-based companies through investment funding and mentorship, all with the goal of accelerating the plant-based food industry and moving the world away from eating animals.
I hope that you learn as much as I did from Chris and are as excited about what’s happening with the future of food. Please listen and share.
Learn More About Unovis Asset Management/New Crop Capital
Learn More About Gathered Foods
Learn More Good Catch Foods
Transcript:
Chris: [00:00:00] We spent 50 years fighting industry and I mean fighting industry, and we were poking a bear and poking a bear and poking a bear. Then one day that bear came up and just nuzzled us under the neck and said, OK, we're we're interested, what's going on? It was the big players that came in and said, why are we fighting this? If consumers are asking for plant based, we can sell plant based.
Elizabeth: [00:00:31] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. This conversation is with Chris Kerr. Chris is on a mission to turn the entire food industry on its head. He's chief investment officer at New Crop Capital, a venture capital fund who invests in entrepreneurs whose products or services replace foods derived from animals. He's also co-founder and CEO of Gathered Foods, known for its Good Catch plant based seafood products. I would love to start at the beginning pre all of this kind of before you were doing any investing or mentoring or running of plant based companies.
Chris: [00:01:42] I could go all the way back to the beginning.
Elizabeth: [00:01:44] Go to the beginning.
Chris: [00:01:46] There was a kind of a back to the Earth movement in the 70s, early 70s and my parents, you know, we grew up, I was born in suburban Philadelphia, and my parents said, we need to simplify our lives. So we moved out to the country, to Pennsylvania. I was seven years old at the time, and to be going from suburban Philadelphia to a farm was like living in a jungle gym. Every day was an adventure. There's always something to do. There's always things to do, things to work on, things to build. I had the world's ugliest but largest tree fort. There was just always something I wanted to build. I was a guy who was, I think today I'd be described as having ADHD. I always tried to get higher, trying to go further, trying to do something that I shouldn't do. If you look at my report cards as a kid, almost every one of them across the board would say, Chris is a really smart student. We wish we could keep him in his seat. We wish Chris would pay more attention. We wish Chris would stop talking out of turn. I always had these asterisks next to my accomplishments which was something of, being out of order. I think my life has been that way. I've always been looking for something new. I've been an entrepreneur since I was very young. My very first job was cleaning the udders on cows when I was seven years old just to get a little bit of coin in my pocket. I started baling hay when I was probably eight or nine, and the hay bales weighed more than I did. I weighed forty nine pounds for some reason for a really long time, and the hay bales reached more than that, trying to break that 50 pound mark. But I was just a really, really hard worker and I loved working. I loved showing adults that this little kid could get things done. So I spent most of my early life, my salad days into my teen years of just trying to kind of prove myself that I could accomplish things. I have that entrepreneurial spirit. I was probably somebody at that age who would have not done well working for somebody else full time. Instead, I had my classmates working for me, mowing lawns or whatever it would be. Up until the age of thirty three I was just kind of going along, arguably on the wrong side of history on everything and I say that openly because I like people to know that you can change. You open your eyes if somebody comes along and helps you. You can take things that otherwise may have been used for ill and turn them to good. The age of thirty three, I met my wife. She's gorgeous. I knew that she was vegan and I said, Hey, I can try that.
Elizabeth: [00:04:09] Were you like a crazy meat eating?
Chris: [00:04:11] I'm from Philadelphia. I had a really good metabolism so I could eat Philly cheesesteaks, chocolate shakes and cheese fries for every meal all week long and I just didn't gain any weight. I was a wrestler and I just never had any problem with my diet, and so I would just eat anything. To this day, I love meat. I just won't eat animals. So it's pretty straightforward. I love food, I crave food. I think about food all the time. I'm a comfort food junkie. When the time came, when I said, You know what? I'm going to follow these ideals. Kirstie opened it up. Kirstie Goldstone's my wife's name. She opened me up to say, Look, you should pay attention to the suffering of others. You should need to open your eyes. That was tough. There's two types of people in this world, as I see it. Those who have this kind of innate sense of right and wrong in the world and those of us who have to see it to believe it, and I needed to see it. But once you see it, you can't unsee it. So that put me at a crossroads that was very difficult. I love food. I do not want to go through the rest of my life with just a little bit of disappointment sprinkled on every meal. I just refused it, and so I wanted my grilled cheese sandwiches that melted. I wanted my cheesesteaks, I wanted all of these things, and I wasn't going to go the rest of my life without it. So if I had been a writer, I'd be writing books about protecting animals. If I were a lawyer, I'd be an animal rights lawyer. If I were, if I were a farmer, I would be running a sanctuary. But I was an entrepreneur and I said, Well, shit, what do I do? I need to put the skills that I have to work. So I just thought, fine, I guess I'm going to invest in things that help animals. Let's take our efforts and put them towards that.
Elizabeth: [00:05:57] When was this?
Chris: [00:05:59] So that was two thousand two we got married. By two thousand three, two thousand four I said, I need to change what I'm doing. By two thousand seven, I had gone to friends at the Humane Society of the United States. This was January two thousand seven and I just sold one of my companies. I called up the team there and I said, What are you guys doing to invest in solutions? Tell me what you're doing? And they said nothing. Can you come talk to us? Now at the time the Humane Society had about one hundred and eighty million in cash. None of it was going to invest in solutions. They're spending one hundred and sixty million dollars a year, changing hearts and minds. But hearts and minds can change back again. You can't rescue your way out of the animal protection world like you can't. So what can we do to actually change it at its base? If we can change people's opinion about eating plants, eating something other than animals, then maybe we wouldn't have to keep hitting them over the head with the ethical and moral baseball bat? So I went to work for the Humane Society and got a Tall Ronan who had run an entity called Veggie Advantage at the time and was very well connected in the food world. He was helping companies bring vegan to them, whether it was a restaurant or whatever it was, catering, you name it. So he introduced me to a few key players, and from there I just hit the ground running. The very first company I worked with was one called Deya. They literally just come out of the oven and so Tall, and I helped get its funding. We got it into Whole Foods, we got them their first customers and they hit the ground running. So in two thousand seven, the Humane Society, we were going to set up a venture capital fund and deploy about twenty five million dollars into the space and crickets. Nobody wanted to invest. Even the Humane Society was like, I think I think about a third of the board, there's twenty seven members on the board. About a third of them thought what I was doing was kind of interesting, a third of them were indifferent, and a third of them hated it. Right up until the Beyond Meat IPO, I think everybody was skeptical. But we did manage to get some money into Beyond Meat and it was very successful. Over seven years, I was able to make four investments which is just incredibly slow.
Elizabeth: [00:08:07] Why was it so slow?
Chris: [00:08:08] I think it's fair to say that if you joined the board of a nonprofit, the last thing you want is blood on your hands, right? It's risky. Making venture capital investment is risky, but you know, it's also risky going undercover. You know, going after the meat industry lobbying. That is really, really risky. You want risk on brand risk. There's nothing more risky than that, but they were known for that as their comfort zone. To take donated money and put it into an investment that might fail with something I think that they were uncomfortable with. They had a sense of stewardship and it was right. It was right to have that. They were not a venture capital fund, but to have that kind of money and not deploy it. They were certainly investing it into campaigns, so why not invest it into some other stuff? That was the thesis, and it worked. We went into Beyond Meat, Miyokos’s Kitchen, Veggie Grill and a company called Hero, which was alternative to animal testing.
Elizabeth: [00:08:57] From there, was that when New Crop started?
Chris: [00:08:59] Yes, I was recruited to run New Crop and I was skeptical. Actually, that's another back story. My wife and I had to go down to D.C. She was a district leader for the Humane Society, and we were down there for a meeting and I met with them. When we came home, we had a bunch of cats, one of them had gotten out. We live deep in the woods and we lost this cat. For eight days, eight days around the clock, we searched for this cat for you. I'm not kidding, the amount of energy that we went into getting that cat back, we brought in wizards to get that like it was remarkable. My wife is Snow White, I mean, she can call upon the animals. She steps outside and all of the animals, deer and turkeys and squirrels, and they all come running. Pepe, our cat went on the loose, and for eight days we searched for her and I thought, if I am willing to put this kind of effort into one animal, you can imagine what I'd be willing to do for a billion. So I called up Bruce, I said we need to do this right, this is really, really important. This is really important work. If we fail here it will, it will fail for a generation. This matters and so I said, let's do it. You got me for a year. We'll see what comes of it.
Elizabeth: [00:10:15] That's incredible. I mean, Pepe kind of changed the future.
Chris: [00:10:17] So in the first year, we did 15 investments. We're the first people to invest in cellular agriculture. We were the first people to go to New Zealand and India and Europe, we would go where no one else would go because somebody had to do it. Somebody had to change the narrative. Somebody had to say, I'll take this risk because the world is risk averse, you know, not that many people want to stick their necks out.
Elizabeth: [00:10:43] Since this all began. The world has changed immensely. Why have all of these plant based companies, why have they taken off so enormously now?
Chris: [00:10:53] Simply put, the food has gotten better. It's gotten better. So when you sit down, if you're a vegan, you sit down on a meal. There was a time where if you ordered vegan, you would be marginalized. You’d be maligned and it would become the topic of the entire meal. Why are you vegan, right? Which is just a disaster. Like, there's no good outcome there. The vegans hope that they're changing your mind, and the other ones are everybody else is fighting you while they're eating the burgers. That's going away. If you look at the stigma that comes with eating plant based, it's really in the last five years that it's changed. That's because it's not as embarrassing. You know, you don't have to convince somebody and say, I know this tastes terrible, but eat it anyway because there's an animal suffering somewhere. Instead, it's just, Hey, this tastes good. The other part is that we spent 50 years fighting industry and I mean, fighting industry, and we were poking a bear and poking a bear and poking a bear. Then one day that bear came up on it just nuzzled us under the neck and said, OK, we're interested, what's going on. It was an industry. It was the big players. It came in and said, You know, why are we fighting this? If consumers are asking for plant based, we can sell plant based. Why do we care? Corporations are designed to take a dollar out of your pocket. They shouldn't care necessarily whether or not it's their product or something new that they invest in. So the industry switched and it started with Cargill. They redefined themselves as a protein company, not a not a meat company. Then Tyson did it. Now, every company in the world is now a protein company. They have also dropped this stigma with it. They've embraced it and they have infrastructure. There's one hundred and fifty years in the making. It's a low end, the low end, it's 60 years in the making. It's post-World War Two. Then you've got Nestlé, you've got Continental Grains is a 200 year old company like they've been around a long time. So you've got an industry that says if we were to take your product and put it through our channels, we can accelerate this. That's what happened with dairy. The reason that dairy worked and the reason that that soy milk became so ubiquitous is because it was able to take a liquid form of milk that was not from a cow, but put it through the exact same system that you use to move regular milk. Plant based meats are a little different in the protein production side of it. But once it's made into its protein, it can go in through any burger form or any sausage maker. It's all the same, it doesn't care. It's just a piece of equipment. Once it's through that form, it can get on to any truck that's going to anywhere else the regular meat's going. So that infrastructure exists. Once the product's got good enough and the demand is there, it's price, awareness, convenience and taste. Those are the four drivers. All of them have to rise equally. But if you don't start with taste, the rest fails. So New Crop has always been focusing on taste, and my mantra goes back to Tall Roman, actually. But my mantra has always been, rally around the chefs, they tell you where the bull's eye is. If there's not a chef in the room, you've convinced yourself that you're right in the wrong.
Elizabeth: [00:13:49] And taste changes a lot with a lot of these products, right? They keep doing new versions.
Chris: [00:13:54] Well it always gets better. The first version of Deya, I took Deya to the Humane Society. It wasn't on the market yet. Honestly, I don't even know whether it was food grade. I took a whole bunch of Deya. I actually took some for Ethan Brown, we have this funny story. The very first, I think the first time I met Ethan Brown, we met at this restaurant in Georgetown and in D.C.. Under the table I handed over this big bag of Deya. It was like doing a cocaine deal and felt like we were doing this drug deal. I'm like, You're going to want this. He's like, Oh. I slit it to him under the table and I swear to God it felt like it felt like we were doing something nefarious. But that same trip, I went to a local pizza shop near the U.S. headquarters and I got 14 pizzas made and I put them in the back of my car. The Daya smelled like butter. It smelled like buttered popcorn. It wasn't a particularly good smell and my whole car had filled with moisture all along. It was dripping from the inside, from these pizzas. I got to the Humane Society. I'm like, You know what, if I'm about to poison the entire department? So I pulled out one pizza and I said, rather than bringing in 14 pizzas, I'm going to bring in one pizza. So I brought it in. I took it down to Josh bulk down there. I said, Josh, I got a pizza here. Well, I said, I have more in the car, but I want to make sure that you liked this first. That thing was gone in a split second. By the time I went out to the car, he had already sent out an email to all four hundred staff members that were at that building that there was free pizza coming to the lunchroom. At that point, I had 13 pizzas left. I brought them all out and I'd say in less than a minute they were gone. Then I thought, OK, now the real test starts because it isn't about how well it tastes, it's also about how it goes through your body. That doesn't always work well. I thought, OK, in about twenty four hours, I'm going to find out whether or not this is a good product and everybody loved it and it worked out well. But the moral of the story is that it was round one and Daya got better and better. Then other products had to compete with that. The best thing that ever happened to Beyond Meat, which was a chicken company, was that Impossible was working on a burger. That got them working on a burger. They had a burger called the Beast Burger, and it was not a particularly good burger. Beyond burger came out after the Beast Burger. I don't know that you'll hear about the Beast Burger anymore. The Beyond Burger was just so much better, and even that has gotten better. So while our products get better and better and better and better. The animal world is static. They can add more flavorings, they can add bacon, add more salt is effectively what they've done. Give us another decade. You're going to be seeing things that are way better, way better than the animal products. We just needed the R&D money to get us there. So that's what's underway now. It's exciting. It's a really exciting time to be in food.
Elizabeth: [00:16:37] Talk about Good Catch because it's so incredibly exciting that Good Catch exists, too.
Chris: [00:16:43] Well, so we started Good Catch. We couldn't find a seafood company to invest in and again I'm an entrepreneur, so starting a company from scratch. I don't blink an eye. I'm just like, alright, let's just do it. If you look at the Unovis team. So Unovis is my asset manager firm that manages New Crop. So if you look at Unovis, we’re made up of entrepreneurs and we're just kind of fearless around it. Our secret sauce historically was Derrick and Chad Sarno worked for Whole Foods, and so I would take them new stuff. They didn't know that they were supposed to follow certain protocols. They just jam stuff into Whole Foods because they work for John Mackey. They were right in his office. So I would go to Chad and say, OK, Chad, here's Daya. I need you to put in Whole Foods. And he said, this is a true story. He said, If my daughter Amaya likes it, she was four, I'll get it in front of Whole Foods and Maya loves it to this day. I think she's like 17 now. She still eats it. But without Maya, I don't know that it would have made it into Whole Foods. We had guys like Chad and Derek who are strategically placed in Whole Foods, and they would bring these products. When we started Good Catch, Chad and Derek had left Whole Foods., and we said, Look, if we wanted to start from scratch, why don't we take our secret sauce and just put it into this company? So that's what we did, so Good Catch was kind of founded on that principle. We brought in some really good talent because we had a track record and we had a little bit of notoriety. We brought in some really, really good talent. We were able to raise money around that. Now the trick with seafood is that it has a perception of being a healthy alternative. If all you focus on is protein and fish oil, which could be a healthy oil, then yeah, fine, it's a good product. But you also get some things you don't want in there, heavy metals, lead, mercury or whatever, whatever might be in the fish. So our argument was, look, if we can create a product that's really kind of a one for one replacement, there will be a market for it. Our fresh stuff, which is coming out now, is exceptional. I've eaten, I had to stop because my wife said enough, but four days straight of tuna subs. I think our product is phenomenal, but the best is just coming out.
Elizabeth: [00:18:57] And what are some of the products that are coming out?
Chris: [00:18:59] My wife's favorites, the crab cakes. I love crab cakes and the fish burger. So we have a frozen line, an ambient line and what we call a fresh one. Fresh is really geared towards food service. So that's where you'll find it. I think sometime in September, it'll hit Whole Foods and Deli counter. We've got the frozen line of burgers, crab cakes and Thai cakes, but we've got other things that are coming. Those are just exceptional products. Most products, you'll bread because they're inferior, and that goes for meat products too, like the crappiest chicken that they end up breading, right? Because everybody loves breading, breading in the oil and fat, you name it. Put it together, it's great. Ours are naked, so you've got a product that stands on it, so it's clean, as can be. It's high in protein, good oils in it. We're really happy with the design of that product. Now we eat between two hundred and three hundred different types of sea creatures, so we've got a long way to go.
Elizabeth: [00:19:50] What is in the products?
Chris: [00:19:52] We focus on high protein and digestibility and in white, so we focus first on bite. Now, most plant based meats have been made either with soy or wheat gluten and then more recently pea. Those are the three big ones. The body's ability to absorb the nutrients from those is pretty critical. So soy has the highest kind of nutrient absorption. That's why it's used throughout the globe. We look at not just that, we look at digestibility as a really big one for us. I personally can't eat an Impossible burger, it makes my whole inside go crazy. But I can eat a lot of Beyond Burgers. I can eat Good Catch without a flinch, without a fight. So there's no problem digesting. So we end up using in our case, it's a blend of pea protein, soy, fava, chickpea, lentil and navy bean, right? The reason that you have different proteins is also in the same way you wouldn't build a house just out of bricks or just out of concrete or just out of glass. You're looking for it to do different things and when you make plant based meat, you're doing the same thing. You're bringing in some proteins for bite or texture or moisture content, right? So some will hold more moisture than others.
Elizabeth: [00:21:00] You just opened your factory in Ohio during the pandemic, right?
Chris: [00:21:04] Well, yeah, I mean, it started well before that. As I like to say, I'll either be heralded or vilified for building that factory. While we were designing the factory, we had a twenty thousand square foot building and we had maxed it out just on paper. At that time Beyond Meat was launching and we were working with a group called PHW, a German chicken manufacturer, and they were trying to get Beyond Meat products in Germany and they couldn't produce enough. They just couldn't produce and I thought, Good Lord, we've already outgrown this factory. We haven't even opened it yet. I watched Miyoko do the same thing. I remember we were going into Miyoko’s, they hadn't opened their factory yet, and they had this small little factory near where Miyoko lives. I walked in there, I think they had just signed the lease, and I walked in and she showed me, where are they going to make their cheese. I said, This is too small. She goes, No, no, no, this will be good for like two years. They were going to put in a little cheese shop up front, and I'm just thinking, you've already outgrown this space, you haven't even put a single human being in here yet. Within six months, they're already looking for new space. The reality is it takes a long time to get these the infrastructure for these companies up and running. You can take a year just to buy and install an extruder. So if the market is growing faster than that, you're already behind the curve. So the thesis with Good Catch was, no matter what people are buying plant based protein. So even if they don't want plant based fish, we can make burgers, we can make chicken, we can make whatever anybody wants. We get requests almost every week to make something for them and the least risky thing we are going to do is build a protein factory. I just knew it. So it was still scary because as I walked in the factory, I didn't even know where I was looking at it. It's a complex building. I literally thought we'd built this factory, and maybe a month later we plug in the equipment and we'd be off and running. It took nine months just to commission a single piece of equipment, learning curve there. But luckily we had some really good experts helping us along the way. So it's a remarkable building. If anybody can get out to Heath, Ohio, we'll give you a tour. It's quite the operation.
Elizabeth: [00:23:09] So now it's all up and running?
Chris: [00:23:10] Yeah, we have two sides of the building. One is protein creation and the other is forming and finishing. So that we have the south side of the building site. Sorry, the north side of the building is really about making the burgers and the crab cakes. Then the south side of the building is where we make the protein and that we just turned on the south side.
Elizabeth: [00:23:29] When you're investing in and mentoring all these companies that are up and coming, how do you choose and how do you know who? Because you seem to find all the home runs right or you're part of them.
Chris: [00:23:40] First of all, we have no fear of missing out. None at all. It's like all ships are rising. You can almost throw a stone anywhere in that company has an opportunity to do well. It’s a one point seven trillion annual industry, global protein industry. If you can't find a home to do five 10 million in revenues, then you're not paying attention. There's just opportunities there, so it's an execution issue. We do not have a fear of missing out. We don't have to be in every deal. We want to be in deals where we can help de-risk one of those four key pillars, price, awareness, convenience and taste. So if we see a nice little company that's got something that tastes great. We have a casso company and I’m a comfort guy. I'm like if this tastes well, it's fantastic. So I'm like, Look, they got taste down now can they scale as price? Can they scale? Can you build awareness around it? Is it something that people will talk about? Will we blog about it? Will it get press, right? So that's the awareness. Then finally, can you make it convenient? Do we have distribution? Can we get it in the food service? Can we get it into retail? So our job as investors is to say, where do we fit in that architecture, if you will? How can we help create strength here? Can we build a foundation on taste? Can we bring more people into our party to create awareness and we have a general sense of whether we can do that or not pretty early on. We recently went into a deal called the Protein Brewery. There's only three investors in it. That's a company that takes sugar waste, anything from sugar beets to corn to sugar cane, and they use it to grow protein. So this fermentation eats sugar and it creates protein and that's a very highly nutritious protein that has amino acids that you can't get through regular like soy. We partnered with Nova Holdings, which is an expert in fermentation. We partnered with Roquette, which is an expert in milling. They're the ones who kind of invented the pea protein. We're experts at taking those proteins and putting them into food, so it's just the three of us. So that deal is really important because we each play a very critical role in the success of the company. If we were just money, well they can get that anywhere. They needed expertise. So we end up being brought into deals because of our expertise or because of our reach or know how. We've just been staring at this face long enough. I might add, I get it wrong as often as I get it right, I don't have any secret sauce about seeing into the future. I just have been staring into space so long that I get a pretty good sense of it, and I'm not the only one.
Elizabeth: [00:26:05] What about cell based meats?
Chris: [00:26:08] When we invested in Memphis Meats I thought we had a mandate to invest in cell agriculture, and we had a universe of one company to invest in. I thought, Well, I guess this is the one we're going to invest in. So we did and luckily, it was Memphis Meats and Uma who was a great CE, did a super job with it. I thought maybe in 15 years I'd be able to eat that chicken. They wouldn't let me eat it at first because I was vegan and I was, you know, it had been a long time since I had meat. They were like, we're not feeding an eight hundred dollar bite of meat to a vegan, even though we have put in a lot of money. I think the first bite was like eight thousand and then a year later was eight hundred, then a year after that, about eighty. I got the eighty dollar bite. That's when they allowed me to kick in. I got to tell you, it was a decade faster than I thought it would be, a decade. I thought, Holy mackerel, if this works, we're looking at, we're looking at a whole new world.
Elizabeth: [00:27:01] We're pretty much on par for turning into a meat free world sometime in the near.
Chris: [00:27:06] When you think about the consumption of meat again, I grew up in a farm country, dairy country. You can be in the meat business by being McDonald's and serving it. You can be at Cargill and packaging it. You can be a farmer raising the cattle, or you can be at 8am feeding the grains to the cattle. You could be DuPont creating the seeds for those grains. You can be John Deere plowing the fields. All of those play a role in getting that burger at McDonald's into your mouth. If I look at the ecosystem of Cell AG, it's just a lot more linear of a line. A lot less parties involved, it’s going to be a lot more efficient. But we have to reinvent what is really a new farming system, and it will be very interesting to see how that plays out because there will definitely be a shakeup. There will definitely be a shake up in our world.
Elizabeth: [00:27:53] Until then, are there companies that you're really excited about?
Chris: [00:27:55] Well, I'm excited about the blending of those two things. I actually think that four years ago, the Beyond Burger didn't exist, Impossible didn't exist and look at that. I mean, that is just an order of magnitude better than anything else that was on the market. If you're a meat lover, I might add. Today, most people who eat regular animal burgers, they eat effectively, this small window type of meat that you're eating. In our world, we can go from a quinoa burger, a portobello mushroom burger, which is not a burger, by the way, all the way to the Impossible Burger and you have that whole spectrum and everybody wins there. Consumers win because look at all those choices that you have. In our world and plant based, you get the same thing. We can get closer and closer to the animal product. You can also go more and more healthy. We can also blend the two. What I suspect is that, I don't know if you remember you're probably too young, but in the 80s, McDonald's had a big crisis around the fact that it was discovered that 40 percent of their burgers were made out of soy. That's where the whole beef patty came out. It was a big, big fight that happened, and it was actually the Cattlemen's Beef Association that called them on it. We've been blending grains with meat for a very long time. So begs the question, how much meat do you need to flavor a burger? It may be a very small amount. The heme philosophy around Impossible is really that of a flavoring. How do you get that flavor when the rest of it can be plants? I have a feeling what we'll find is that Cell AG will end up becoming an ingredient for flavoring, and it could end up being that we need two percent, five percent, 10 percent of it might be Cell AG, and the rest of it's going to still be a blend of various grains.
Elizabeth: [00:29:28] Great, awesome. Chris, thank you. This was really great. Really exciting.
Chris: [00:29:35] Happy to be on. All right. Thanks a lot.
Elizabeth: [00:29:47] To learn more about Chris and the many companies that he is involved in, go to our website. We will have links to everything. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare minute and could do us a favor, please rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people to find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. We're on Patreon, it's Patreon.com/SpeciesUnite. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Natalie Martin, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Gabrielle Sibilska, Santina Polky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.
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